Women and The ER .. What A Disaster?

I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.

Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge.

Once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before a marathon, she limped across the finish line anyway.

So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, I called the ambulance.

I gave the dispatcher our address, then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.

I don’t know how long it took for the ambulance to reach us that Wednesday morning.

Pain and panic have a way of distorting time, ballooning it, then compressing it again.

But when we heard the sirens wailing somewhere far away, my whole body flooded with relief. That morning.

As we loaded into the ambulance, here’s what we didn’t know: Rachel had an ovarian cyst, a fairly common thing. “Ovarian torsion represents a true surgical emergency,” says an article in the medical journal Case Reports in Emergency Medicine. … Ramifications include ovarian loss, intra-abdominal infection, sepsis, and even death. ” The best chance of salvaging a torsed ovary is surgery within eight hours of when the pain starts.

There is nothing like witnessing a loved one in deadly agony.

Your muscles swell with the blood they need to fight or run. And there we stopped.

The intake line was long—a row of cots stretched down the darkened hall. Someone wheeled a gurney out for Rachel.

Shaking, she got herself between the sheets, lay down, and officially became a patient.

Emergency-room patients are supposed to be immediately assessed and treated according to the urgency of their condition.

Other nurses’ reactions ranged from dismissive to condescending. “You’re just feeling a little pain, honey,” one of them told Rachel, all but patting her head.

We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has.

I saw only the way Rachel’s whole face twisted with the pain.

Soon, I started to realize—in a kind of panic—that there was no system of triage in effect.

The other patients in the line slept peacefully, or stared up at the ceiling, bored, or chatted with their loved ones.

It seemed that arrival order, not symptom severity, would determine when we’d be seen.

As we neared the ward’s open door, a nurse came to take Rachel’s blood pressure.

By then, Rachel was writhing so uncontrollably that the nurse couldn’t get her reading.

From an early age we’re taught to observe basic social codes: Be polite. Ask nicely. Wait your turn.

I found myself pleading, uselessly, for that kind of special treatment. The average emergency-room patient in the U. S.

Everyone we encountered worked to assure me this was not an emergency. “Stones,” one of the nurses had pronounced.

She’d be fine, I convinced myself, if I could only get her something for the pain. By 10 a. m. , Rachel’s cot had moved into the “red zone” of the E. , a square room with maybe 30 beds pushed up against three walls.

She hardly noticed when the attending physician came and visited her bed; I almost missed him, too.

His visit was so brief it didn’t register that he was the person overseeing Rachel’s care.

Around 10:45, someone came with an inverted vial and began to strap a tourniquet around Rachel’s trembling arm.

Rachel fell into a kind of shadow consciousness, awake but silent, her mouth frozen in an awful, anguished scowl. “That to me felt like this deeply personal and deeply upsetting embodiment of what was at stake,” she said. “Not just on the side of the medical establishment—where female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated—but on the side of the woman herself: My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic. “Female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated”: We saw this from the moment we entered the hospital, as the staff downplayed Rachel’s pain, even plain ignored it. “Lot of patients to get to, honey,” we heard, again and again, when we begged for stronger painkillers.

But this particular ER, like many in the United States, had no attending OB-GYN.

And every nurse’s shrug seemed to say, “Women cry—what can you do?

Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. “My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.

How long is it appropriate to continue to process a traumatic event through language, through repeated retellings?

Still, in the throes of debilitating pain, she tried to bite her lip, wait her turn, be good for the doctors.